In week 10 of the 2013 season, the Rams traveled to Indianapolis. By the end of the season, St. Louis had an SRS grade of +2.2, meaning they were 2.2 points better than average. The Colts finished 2013 with an SRS grade of +4.1; if you award three points for home field, we would expect Indianapolis to have defeated St. Louis by 4.8 points (the Colts, in fact, were 9-point favorites). What happened? You probably remember: Tavon Austin had a record-setting day, the Rams jumped out to a 28-0 halftime lead, and Andrew Luck wasn’t able to mount one of his patented comebacks. St. Louis posted a Game Script of 23.2, the second largest result of the season, en route to a 38-8 victory.

Instead of a 4.8-point loss, the Rams won by 30 points. That difference of 34.8 points made it the least-conforming game of the 2013 season. What was the most? In week 6, the Chiefs (SRS of +6.1) hosted the Raiders (SRS of -8.0) and won, 24-7.

The table below shows every regular season game in 2013. The “Boxscore” cell is linked to the boxscore for that game on PFR, the “Exp” column shows the expected result, and the “Diff” column — by which the table is sorted — shows the difference between the expected result and the actual result.

If you sort the table by the “Exp” column and then by win/loss (click twice to sort by wins), you can see the biggest “upsets” of the season regardless of margin of victory. The largest upset is one we didn’t recognize at the time: the Texans, favored by 6.5 points, defeated the Chargers in week one. Of course, that was before we realized Houston would finish the season 2-14; in retrospect, the Chargers would have been expected to win by 13.3 points.

The second biggest upset fits closer to the normal definition: the Jaguars picked up their first win of the season in Tennessee in week 10. Jacksonville was a 13-point underdog entering that game, and that was the biggest upset win by Vegas standards in 2013.

The Colts led the way with three non-conforming games (on the positive side) of 20+ points: a 20-point win in San Francisco, a 34-point win in Jacksonville, and a 16-point victory in Kansas City. The Jets and Eagles both had four non-conforming games (on the negative side) of 17+ points. Philadelphia lost by 14 at home to Dallas (in a game where Nick Foles and Michael Vick were injured) and then by 8 at home to the Giants in back-to-back weeks in the middle of the season. On top of those two losses was an embarrassing 52-20 loss in Denver and an inexplicable 48-30 loss in Minnesota. For the Jets, blowout losses actually seemed to conform to the tone of the season for me, but the numbers say the 23-point loss in Buffalo, the 25-point loss in Tennessee, the 40-point loss in Cincinnati and the 20-point home loss to Miami were non-conforming games.

Of course, by definition, every team must have the sum of their “diff” column equal zero, so having a lot of non-conforming games in one direction generally means several in the other direction, too (for the Jets, victories over New Orleans and Miami were +17 above expectation to balance out some of the blowout losses). But this would be further evidence that the Colts and Jets were two of the most inconsistent teams in the NFL in 2013. For Philadelphia, while the Vikings games was an odd one, the other games occurred before the Foles Domination Tour really took hold in Philadelphia, so I wouldn’t label the Eagles as a wildly inconsistent team — just a different team at different stages of the season.

One way to measure how inconsistent a team was is to take the standard deviation of the “diff” rating for each team in every game; the larger the variance, the more inconsistent the team.

Congrats, Falcons fans. Your team was the most consistent in the NFL in 2013.

James

Kansas City vs Houston, Seattle vs Tampa Bay, and New England vs Cleveland all practically tie for the least conforming games that still ended in a win for the favorite. That sounds about right.

Interesting that the Texans are the opponents in the next two games as well when they narrowly lost to the Seahawks and Cardinals. So even when they played their best/the opponent played their worst they still managed to go 0-3. Probably has something to do with that 2-14 record…

Chase Stuart

I am glad someone is getting good use out of the sortable tables!

Tom

As someone who enjoys predicting scores, etc., I love this kind of stuff…it reminds us that anything can happen after the kickoff, no matter how much we think we “know” the two teams involved. All anyone could say after that Colts/Rams game was, “What the HELL was that?”

George

Interesting stuff as usual. I’ve started to work out things slightly differently, (I’ve figured you can do the Winston model, and have it solve for individual home field advantages, which gives a slightly better fit on the model), so I had virtually the same top 5 in terms of games but had a slightly different order (with the Bengals vs the Jets game at the top, from the Eagles vs the Bears game and then Rams vs the Colts). Have to agree with you though the Colts were the most inconsistent team by a mile (especially when you consider they didn’t have as many problems as the Eagles). Out of interest do you have any figures on inconsistency for other years? Things didn’t seem to quite fit for me this year, as I was expecting things to go, and wondered about a variety of different things (I just didn’t get this year at all in many ways).